David Hachuel wants pictures of your poop -- for science. The computer scientist-turned-entrepreneur is working to build the world's largest database of human stool photos -- up to 100,000 in all. The images will be used to teach an artificial intelligence to tell the difference between stool that's consistent with good health and stool that could be evidence of gastrointestinal ailments like irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn's disease. The color, shape and consistency of stool hold important clues that help doctors make diagnoses. Hachuel thinks the photos can form the basis of an app that nonphysicians can use to obtain such information on their own.

San Francisco (CNN)The next time you go to the bathroom, a couple startups are hoping you'll snap a photo before you flush. Two companies -- Auggi, a gut-health startup that's building an app for people to track gastrointestinal issues, and Seed Health, which works on applying microbes to human health and sells probiotics -- are soliciting poop photos from anyone who wants to send them. The companies began collecting the photos online on Monday via a campaign cheekily called "Give a S--t" (you can imagine what the dashes stand for) with the goal of creating the first known data set of human poop images. These pictures -- the companies hope to collect 100,000 photos in total -- can then be used to build AI for research into gut-related diseases and to help people with such health conditions more easily track their own bowel movements. "We like to say it's basically a data dump that gets flushed away each day that could really inform science," Seed cofounder and co-CEO Ara Katz told CNN Business.